Facebook’s Pride flag raises questions

As LGBTQ Pride Month draws to a close, Facebook’s rainbow Pride flag reaction is expected to go away. But there is much, much more to the story behind the reaction than you may realize. Certainly more than I realized.

The Pride flag reaction appeared on my Facebook sometime around the beginning of the month, alongside the trademark thumbs-up, heart, and laughing, sad and angry faces. I didn’t think much of it — except I wasn’t really sure when and under what circumstance it would be appropriate to use.

As it turns out, I seem to be among a relatively small number of Facebook users who could see it. According to Facebook, the feature is only available in “major markets with Pride celebrations” — to include New York City, San Francisco, Chicago, Seattle and Boston. It is also available to people who follow Facebook’s LGBTQ page.

I’m not in either group, but somehow it was available to me, too. I’m not sure why or how.

In a truly fascinating article at The Atlantic, J. Nathan Matias, Aimee Rickman and Megan Steiner conducted a study to find out exactly who had access to the rainbow flag reaction, and examined whether this was yet another case of “digital gerrymandering,” a term coined in 2014 by Harvard Law professor Jonathan Zittrain.

Digital gerrymandering is a captivating (and kind of scary) concept built around the notion that a large social network like Facebook could use its top-secret, proprietary algorithms to create political bubble and ultimately influence elections.

“Algorithmic political bubbles are hard to detect because they show something different to each person,” the authors of the Atlantic study wrote. “Only by comparing notes can people map the boundaries of what a platform chooses to show its users.”

Using Facebook’s algorithms, the team conducted an “algorithmic audit, asking hundreds of Facebook users in 30 cities to report if they could access the Pride reaction.”

Here’s what they found. An overwhelming majority of people who had not expressed any interest in LGBTQ issues on Facebook could still access the Pride reaction if they lived in New York City, San Francisco, Chicago, Seattle or Boston. However, the same city-wide access was not granted to cities like Philadelphia, Detroit, Phoenix and Nashville, the report found.

The study discovered that Facebook users who had “liked” LGBTQ-friendly pages or belonged to LGBTQ Facebook groups were 46 percent more likely to have access to the Pride flag than those who had expressed no interest in LGBTQ issues.

There is some belief that restricting city-wide access to the Pride reaction could be a PR move for the company — allowing Facebook to benefit from the positive publicity in cities that generally support gay rights while avoiding negative reactions elsewhere.

And while there may not be anything explicitly nefarious or untoward about this roll-out of the rainbow flag, it does feel a little bit like a social experiment — or, if you’re a little more conspiracy-minded, a test run for something larger.

Anyone who has spent much time studying propaganda will understand the importance of controlling the message. And Facebook’s enormous audience and top-secret algorithms give the company extraordinary power in that regard. By cordoning users into ever-shrinking algorithm bubbles, the company can further restrict the flow of adverse or competing points of view — a problem that is already compounded by the current, partisan media landscape of cable news.

It’s also worth noting that it benefits Facebook to show you things with which you agree, because it you’re more likely to spend more time on your news feed if you aren’t seeing posts that you disagree with.

I’m not accusing Facebook of “digital gerrymandering,” per se, but it’s probably something that should be on your radar.